Month: May 2010

I’ve had a wild ride over the past ~4.5 years, starting with MySQL AB as a “Support Engineer”, and working through to “Senior Support Engineer”, and then “Regional Support Manager, Americas” with the MySQL Support Team – truly one of the best product support teams I’ve ever known in the IT industry, even if I am biased.

I’ve always had a passion for helping people, which is why I think I did “OK” in Support. However I’ve always also had a second passion which has been bubbling away for me too – building solutions for diagnosing database issues. I started in the database world in the Oracle market, working on monitoring and management tools. MySQL “poached” me from there whilst I was building a MySQL monitoring module for the cross database monitoring tool that we had, as well as working in a supporting/consulting role for our customers.

Given my background when I joined, I was an obvious person to be put in to an internal coordinator role to manage interaction between the team that develops MySQL Enterprise Monitor and Support back then (before MEM reached it’s first GA), so I also had the pleasure of working with that team pretty closely for my time in Support.

It satisfied my second passion for a long time. Now it’s time to take the leap back to that full time!

At the start of this week I started in my new role, as a “Software Development Manager” for the Enterprise Tools team, still within MySQL/Oracle, working full time on MySQL Enterprise Monitor and MySQL Proxy.

I’m pretty excited about the new role – I want to help make monitoring and management of MySQL easy, both by getting more of the “right” data from the server, and by representing it all in coherent ways for DBAs in our tools, so that they too can be more productive in making the right choices when managing their systems. I feel pretty well placed to do that now. 🙂

If you’re a customer that has used MEM and wants to give any feedback, or even just an interested user in the community – I’m all ears, either leave your comments here, or ping me by email (first_name.last_name@oracle.com) – I’d love to have some discussions with you about your needs, likes, or dislikes.

I thank every person in Support for my time with them, however I owe all of that time to one fairly anonymous guy in the “external” MySQL world, but a man mountain “internally” – Dean Ellis, the man who convinced me to join MySQL AB all those years ago, and has been a fantastic mentor and manager over the years to me. Mr Ellis – I salute you. Thanks for bringing me on the ride, I still don’t regret it, no matter how much you tried to make me! 😉

Enterprise Tools team – Look Out, you have me to whine at you full time now!